November, 1971 Archive

It’s three o’clock in the morning
On a rainy Saturday night
I’m up at this ungodly hour
But I’m not even stoned or tight.
I’m a gruntin’ and a groanin’
Though I know that it just ain’t right
I’m stuck on this fuckin’ grinder
Until the dawnin’ light.

I’ve got those heavy, tombstone, graveyard grinderman’s blues

And when that mornin’ finally comes
I drag-ass home to sleep
My bedroom window’s boarded up
The daylight out to keep.
But in my mind that grinder churns
It never stops or slows
Instead of wood against the stone
I dream I push my nose.

I’ve got those heavy, tombstone, graveyard grinderman’s blues

When I wake up it’s dark again
And I need a piece of tail
But my wife she says, go chop some wood
And empty the garbage pail.
So I do as I’m told, I pick up the axe
And go out in the evenin’ chill
Cause heftin’ and heavin’ those logs for the stove
Is good practise for work at the mill.

I think this is what Plato’s Diotima means: the succeeding generations we procreate are like the recurrent memories of a real experience lost to time. Each generates the future in hopes of recapturing the past. Remembering, we approach, but also recede from what is remembered. We, our parents, and our offspring–lost relatives in search of the absolute.

In a corner of her backyard in L.A.
My mother-in-law waters the young Bougainvilla
She bought to hide the green steel hatch
Of the bomb shelter her son no longer uses
To make out in with Shirley Jingles.

From their underground bower of bliss
They would gaze at a frozen sunset
Framed in a grainy picture window
Sized colour photograph.

Shouldering an ancient pike pole
I walk the flume on day shift
Poke, pry jammed chunks
Freeing the flow of wood to the grinders
Where butchered forests are chomped into gruel
To feed the mighty nine and ten
That roll forth tree-trunk spools of newsprint.

Not now…
The season of apocalypse is over
The sun will not eclipse again
Until this decade ripens.